Poetry

for Dale Devereux Barker   The artist and author wish to express their gratitude to the publications in which these collaborations originally appeared: “Particeps Criminis”: TransAtlantic News; “Disgruntled Lug”: Science and Wonder; “Forbidden Rhymes”: Psychology Today; “A Sable Figure Cloaked in Gloom Told Us This Hilarious Joke”: Psychological Digest; “Killer Abstractions”: Modern Psychology; “You Don’t…

You are the hero of this poem, the one who leans into the night and shoulders the stars, smoking a cigarette you’ve sworn is your last before reeling the children into bed. Or you’re the last worker on the line, lifting labeled crates onto the dock, brown arms bare to the elbow, your shirt smelling…

You will use it for the flowers the others bring because he is dead. Or you will use it for dark blue light, the arc of it when, the next evening, the sun cries over the house and sends all the windows to the floor. A trill of orchids wilts over the rim. You will…

A year later, a Tuesday or Wednesday,           I remember the students out back playing tennis           in air so cold it puckered the rain barrel & my radio said what it           couldn’t say while Big Joe did bench presses in the basement           & the radio went idiotically silent. Remember Al Hibler singing…

Corolla, the part composed of petals. Corymb, the flat-topped, vague inflorescence opened first. Flower, array of fertile and sterile leaves forming the reproductive fabric of angiosperms, my friend, the botanist, says, a line inserted in her chest below the breast, through a cleft and fixed to a pump she calls Marion, after her doctor. Marion…

Your head is the heaviest cabbage in the world, full of spiced apples and lamb. Where you are is where you must be—a gravel parking lot by a squat cinder-block building, slumped, a dropped marionette. You breathe, a ray aside a bucket of chum— after giving up the hook. The bow toward the big city….

Early January—gray millennial sky, clumps of snow the color of oysters here, there, under the besieged hemlocks. I follow my little dog along our gravel road to the brook crossing—there’s sludge and chain oil and silt in the roily water where the dog sniffs around, tail low, lifting his leg, claiming acreage; but it all…

I went to the river, but the river was dry. I fell to my knees, and looked to the sky. —Emmylou Harris Colleen, this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my virulent love for you. The Cowturdville Star-Times, which usually has a typo in every column, says…

The moment before I was born Mom sent Dad to Kepley’s Drive-in for a country ham sandwich. My unspoken name was country ham sandwich. My spoken name was tank because I rolled over and crushed the world, and was made of green metal. I was later called “surprise,” a polite name for stolen. Go to…